I have serious misgivings about the legality and wisdom of the facts related in the second part of this letter headed “Máire Geoghegan-Quinn’s fantasy world and the world of Atlantic Philanthropies.” The first part of the letter deals with the prevalence of misrepresentation by the Yes-Side in delivering their message. The two are offered as a serious indictment of the way in which the Referendum arguments have been so firmly backed by yourself, your Government and your party.

Why is it that a campaign in the name of love should be so tainted by expressions of hate? Advocates appeal, powerfully, to our emotions and sympathy but they deny the role of reason and the rules of public debate. Many of those who campaign to change the Constitution—backed by many millions of dollars of funding—appear to believe that they can achieve their aim by emotional blackmail and browbeating.

I find it necessary to affirm, over and again, that “it’s okay to be rational”. Denying one’s opponents the right to disagree, tearing down their posters and smothering expressions of dissent, are all indices of fascism. Yet they are justified by “liberals”. Their slogan? “Let’s treat everyone equally.”Worse has happened. To begin with the Government got the wording wrong, I pointed it out and they had to change it. They started out with an “Equality Referendum”. Judge Cross changed that to the more honest title, “Marriage Referendum”. I have shown in repeated statements that a very strange definition of marriage will eventually emerge. Ireland has been told that “Same-Sex Marriage” is a Human Right. No nation’s constitution, no international human rights convention has accepted this. A growing number of Irish men and women openly disagree with what the noisy “Yes Side” are telling them about how they should vote.

Same-sex people, who desire to love each other, do not qualify to be subsumed among those with the unique access to procreation which is at the heart of marriage between a man and a woman. They may qualify for a different kind of union with access to children through a variety of different methods. But the difference is an unbridgeable one and the language for describing that difference cancels out all attempts at invention or contrivance.

This difference, between a ‘union’ and a ‘marriage’, is the dilemma at the heart of the present debate in Ireland. Marriage is unique in nature and in human life within our society and with the societies of all nations on earth. Nature itself could not exist without the same instinctive and positive continuation of all species by procreation through the sexual conjunction of male with female.

On Tuesday 5 November 2013 the Cabinet, at its regular meeting, decided to agree to the proposal of the Constitutional Convention to hold a Referendum to introduce Same-Sex Marriage as a right in the Constitution and to change the voting age for the election of the country’s president.

From that decision on, the Referendum process we are now engaged in became a reality and the issues surrounding it became political ones. They were more profound and more complicated than was then realised and they have created a multitude of problems for people throughout the country.

Legally, the 2013 decision changed the position of financial aid provided by the American organisation, Atlantic Philanthropies, as a major benefactor of the Irish organisations that make up the Yes Side campaign. The decision changed also the status of the many people who are working for those projects receiving substantial grants from Atlantic Philanthropies.

In early April I sent Alan Shatter a paper put together by a group of concerned citizens and widely distributed. It was called Same-Sex Marriage in the Irish Constitution and it contained a careful and responsible analysis of all the main arguments between the YES and the NO sides in the upcoming referendum, including the issue he raised when he gave the Irish Times interview on Monday May 4 to Sarah Bardon, denying any link between Surrogacy and the Same-Sex Marriage Referendum.

Alan Shatter either read this document, which was sent to him personally by email, or he decided deliberately to ignore it. Neither course is worthy of him, in the light of what he said and what was reported as the main Page One lead in TheIrish Times on Monday 4 May.

As you will recall, I wrote to you on 25th February last about the referendum introducing same-sex marriage into the Constitution.

We have known each other for the whole of your political career, having first met after you succeeded your father in the by-election that resulted from his death. These were my first two years as a journalist working in the Dail. It is probable I first met you at that time. With ups and downs, inevitable in the relationship between politicians and the journalists who record their lives, I have always had an admiration for your calm style, in opposition and in power, and for a quality I have admired in you, the likeable human appeal that I think of when I think about the career of another politician I have always greatly admired, Jack Lynch. He had the common touch as you have, an ability to be naturally relaxed and friendly.

We are being asked to change marriage, from being a natural moral institution to being a constitutional construct from which meaning and traditional values will be stripped. The Government are rushing this through without adequate debate and without necessary legislative preparation.

A Study Paper on Same-Sex Marriage, by a group of citizens with advice from senior counsel and academic lawyers, has helped me in my recent lecturing and writing. This on-going work of legal and social policy analysis attempts to fill the gap caused by Government failure to conduct or publish any form of analysis of what they intend in the Referendum. The following issues are covered: the equality argument, the rights of children, solemnising marriage, blood relations, constitutional policy, educational policy and the flawed wording.

As a non-lawyer, and indeed as a non-Irish speaker as well, I became aware of the impact Same-Sex Marriage on the existing legal framework on reading the Study Paper. I was deeply shocked that the Government could not possibly be aware of this. I give here examples from the issues listed above.

It is good to know that the Government still has some capacity to listen to criticism. That was a the original feeling I had after the conclusion of my campaign on the ‘Flawed Wording’ of the Same-Sex Marriage amendment – wording that is now changed and was so announced by the Taoiseach on Tuesday.

However, my confidence in the capacity of our senior politicians to listen to criticism was short-lived. Within a day I received a letter from Eamon Gilmore, former leader of the Labour Party, telling me that the Oireachtas Translation Service had reassured the Government that my concerns “are unfounded and that the wording, as originally published, clearly allows both opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples to marry”. Since when did this “Service” manage constitutional texts or advise the Government on language matters?

The Irish Constitution, and the Irish people whom the Constitution serves, are both seriously threatened by the Government through uncertainty in the wording of the new Article to be inserted under the Marriage Equality Bill. This would become the definitive textual source and reference point for a new right to marry.

The proposal is so seriously flawed that the passage of the new Article into the Constitution by popular mandate of the electorate should be withheld. The Oireachtas should insist that the flaws in this amendment are repaired before a same-sex marriage proposal it put to the people. This is not only my personal opinion but is the legal opinion of senior counsel and distinguished academic lawyers who will be making their research findings public in due course.